Sunday, March 1, 2015

Stop the outrageous Saddam nostalgia

The man was responsible for more deaths than the Syrian and Lebanese civil wars put together.

It’s a curious fact that criticism of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein quite often gets coupled with the claim that his reign in Iraq was not as unpleasant as has generally been made out. This has been true more or less since day one of the intervention; no one yet has topped the breathtaking shamelessness and crudity of Michael Moore’s 2004 depiction in Fahrenheit 9/11 of Saddam’s Iraq as literally a garden of children and kites.

But similar, if occasionally better-dressed variants of the theme have long been making their way into respectable publications, and increasingly so as prospects of Western intervention in the region have revived since Bashar al-Assad’s crossing last summer of Obama’s red-line-that-wasn’t. In June, the Independent disgraced itself with a piece saying “life wasn’t so bad at all” for Iraqis in the 1980s. Later the same month, Anne-Marie Slaughter got away with saying in the New York Times that Saddam was “far less brutal” than Assad. And this week, the Washington Post published an op-ed by the son of a Saddam-era Iraqi Air Force member fondly remembering the pre-1990 “Iraq I loved and was proud of,” which was a “modern, Westernized and secular” marvel that only turned sour after the Americans prevented the natural progression of Baathist enlightenment into Kuwait.

What were some of the highlights of this golden age? A book written in 1993 called Cruelty and Silence by the Iraqi intellectual Kanan Makiya recalls a few. Here are excerpts from a conversation Makiya had with a Kurdish Iraqi boy, describing one memorable encounter with Saddam’s Westernized modernity in 1988:

Makiya: When they opened the door of the lorry, what was the first thing you saw?

Taimour Abdallah: The first thing I saw was the pits, dug and ready.

[…]

M: They pushed you directly off the truck into the pit?

A: Yes.

[…]

M: How many people were put inside?

A: One pit to every truck.

M: And how many people were in a truck?

A: About one hundred people.

[…]

M: Soldiers were surrounding the whole grave?

A: Yes. […] There were two soldiers […] We sat in the pit and they fired bullets at us.

[…]

M: The soldier who pushed you back into the hole, was he the one who shot you the second time?

A: Yes. This soldier shot me again after he received the order from the officer who was standing beside the pit.

[…]

M: What about the rest of the people, were they all dead?

A: They didn’t make noises.

Abdallah is the only known survivor of Saddam’s systematic extermination of Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s – a campaign officially described in government documents as “the heroic operations of the Anfal,” a Quranic term for war booty (Saddam’s “secularism” often took such strange forms, like when he introduced amputation and branding with hot irons as punishments for theft, citing the Islamic shari`a as justification). Along with every member not just of his family but of his entire village, Abdallah had been rounded up by the army and transported to the desert near the Saudi border, where firing squads and mass graves awaited. By extraordinary chance, the two bullets he received failed to kill him, and he managed to flee under the cover of dark to a nearby Bedouin camp, where he was sheltered and eventually reunited with Kurdish relatives. He was 12 years old.

What happened to Abdallah’s village happened to over 1,200 villages in Iraqi Kurdistan throughout 1988. We’ll never know the total number of Kurds thus extirpated with certainty, but the regime’s own “Chemical” Ali Hassan al-Majeed (whose nickname came from his enthusiastic use of the weapons of mass destruction Iraq is supposed never to have had) himself admitted to a figure of 100,000. The more likely number of 180,000, based on Kurdish sources, is now generally accepted (Patrick Cockburn, for example, whose decades of reporting from Iraq have been consistently critical of Western policy, considers it reliable). As a rule of thumb, when it comes to Saddam, the facts are usually far worse than initially believed.

Of course, 1988 was only one of 24 years of Saddam’s rule, which also featured the killing of some 150,000 Shiites in 1991, and well over 100,000 Iranians from 1980-88, and over 1,000 Kuwaitis in 1990, and untold thousands of Iraqis of every sect and ethnicity for any number of reasons at one point or another. How bad was Saddam? Add the death toll of the current Syrian war to that of the 15-year-long Lebanese civil war, and throw in Hafez al-Assad’s massacre at Hama in 1982, and you’re still nowhere close to how many he killed.

Not that statistics can begin to do justice to the complete, unique gruesomeness of this regime: the state-employed rapists (“violation of women’s honor” was the exact job description used in the government paperwork, according to documents seen by Makiya), who would often carry out their work in the presence of their victims’ relatives, sometimes in designated ‘rape rooms’ of prisons; the burning alive of children in front of parents as interrogation technique; the imprisonment and torture of total innocents as deliberate policy; the ‘Victory Arch’ Saddam had built in Baghdad using fifty-foot replicas of his own forearms, carrying 24-ton stainless steel swords above 5,000 genuine bullet-ridden and blood-stained Iranian helmets. Quite a legacy to “love” and be “proud of,” and quite a state of affairs to be remembered with nostalgia in the finest newspapers of the ‘free world’.